TIME
July 2, 1984, U.S. Edition 

The Keen Edge of Ruben Blades; 
He is a lawyer, essayist and . . . oh, yes -- a
terrific musician 

By Jay Cocks. Reported by Mary Ann French/New York 

Quick. Catch him now, before he gets elected. 

He is 35, one of the biggest stars in Latin American
music, a composer who can combine bold lyrics,
intricate narratives and bright, salsa-inflected
melodies with the fine flair of the best
singer-songwriters. Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend,
Jackson Browne come first to mind, and if that is
heavy, heady company, then all right, just keep the
jostling to a minimum and make a little room. 

But even way up there at the top where the air is
thin, Ruben Blades would seem a rare, highflying
creature. His songs have not only rhythms that
insinuate but lyrics that can touch the conscience
with humane political passion. He has been a lawyer
for a bank in Panama, a mail boy working for a Latin
record company in New York City and one of the main
perpetrators, with Trombonist Willie Colon, of
Siembra, estimated to be the bestselling salsa album
in history. He currently writes short essays on art
and politics for the newspaper La Estrella de Panama;
conducts a long-distance collaboration with Gabriel
Garcia Marquez on a cycle of songs based on some of
the Nobel prizewinner's early stories; and, with his
pistol-hot band, Seis del Solar (Six from the
Tenement), has been galvanizing a concert tour that
has ricocheted from Berkeley, Calif., to the Cannes
Film Festival and home to New York City. He can also
be heard on the sound track of Beat Street, the just
opened break-dancing movie, doing nicely by a lollipop
love theme. But the best place to catch Blades and his
Tenement Six is on their new Elektra/Asylum album,
Buscando America (Searching for America). All the
record's seven cuts are sung in Spanish, but if there
is a better album this year in any language, its
impact will have to be measured off the charts. On the
Richter scale, maybe. 

It seems a shame, then, that Blades is going into
Panama politics. He has a while yet to change his
mind, which is good news for anyone who favors music
with a hard edge and a hard swing. This fall Blades
will move farther north, from his bachelor apartment
on Manhattan's Upper West Side to the cultivated wilds
of Cambridge, Mass., where he will work for a master's
degree in law at Harvard. "I am totally convinced that
I am going to have a lot to do with the future of my
country," he says. "But I don't want people to say,
'What does this guy know? He's been singing.'" Getting
a master's is probably a prudent first step on a very
extravagant course, but anyone who has listened to
Blades sing his songs in his streetwise tenor would
have no doubt that he knows plenty already. 

As he says of Garcia Marquez, Blades has "one foot on
the moon and the other on the earth. We are both
citizens of an emotional continent." Blades' songs,
featuring characters as diverse as political
policemen, murdered priests and pregnant teen-agers,
explore exotic territory that is made immediate and
familiar by his graceful narrative gifts and by the
fleet, conversational translations of the lyrics that
he provides on the album's inner cover ("Where do
people who disappear go to? Look in the water and in
the high grass . . . When do they return? Every time
our thoughts bring them back"). 

His music is instantly infectious but startling,
because salsa in the U.S. has always been
subterranean. Predominantly Afro-Cuban and heavy on
brass, salsa singed the edges of the pop music scene
in the mid-'70s without ever burning through to the
center. On Buscando America, Blades replaced the
traditional brass with vibes, giving the music a
somewhat easier, more seductive feel that loses
nothing in intensity. "I couldn't just take away the
Afro-Cuban format," Blades says. "It was the only link
to the people. I basically kept the music and changed
the lyrics." Blades has taken contemporary American
Latin music and not only made it Latin American but
pushed it even further, universalized it. 

Blades' next outing, to be written and recorded before
law school classes begin, will be in English, and for
the occasion he will switch his first name to Panama,
partly in homage to his homeland and partly in
remembrance of his grandfather, who was drawn from
Barbados by the boomtown allure of the canal. Blades'
grandmother Emma had a strong hand in raising Ruben
and his four siblings. His mother, a piano player and
singer, and his father, a percussionist, police
detective and basketball star, "never stopped working.
They always wanted for us to be ahead of them." Emma
was far ahead of her time and maybe out of it as well:
a yogi, a feminist, a Rosicrucian, a vegetarian, a
"wonderfully crazy woman who practiced levitation and
instilled in me the silly notion that justice is
important, and that we can all serve and be part of
the solution." 

Such service exacts its price. In 1980 Blades wrote
and recorded a biting parable about international
intervention called Tiburon (Shark): 

The moon rests amidst the silence Resting on the great
Caribbean Only the shark is still awake Only the shark
is on the prowl Only the shark is restless. . . 

Lyrics like that got Blades banned from the most
popular Latin station in Miami, which ran an editorial
calling him a Communist. The charge infuriated Blades
not only because of its inaccuracy but because his
parents now live in Miami and were caught up in the
furor. Blades' life was threatened, and he took the
precaution of suiting up in a bulletproof vest. He has
not performed in Miami again. 

Before classes start at Harvard, Blades and the band
will play the Montreux International Jazz Festival,
then tour Panama, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Ecuador,
taking the music back to its taproots. The music
business characterizes the kind of musical-cultural
hybridization Blades is carrying off as a
"cross-over." Says Blades: "I would rather think more
in terms of converging than of cross-over, because if
you cross over it might be lonely on the other side."
Blades deserves a lot of company wherever he goes, and
will get it if there is any justice. And he knows that
there is. Grandmother Emma told him so.